This blog post is about my user alignment goals and the intention of this site. It also delves into my wireframes ideas.
Target Audience
1. Future Employers: a fixed portion of my website will serve to be an extension of my academic skillset
from which I would hope for employers to derive meaning from.This will include my games and the software projects i've done.
2. Young, inquisitive people: these are the people who are interested in discourse around socio-cultural issues that affect our livelihoods
within a South African context and internationally.
Type of Content
With this website, I aim to create a balance of showcasing my academic skill set and capabilities with my own reviews and
analyses of socio-cultural and political issues affecting SA citizens within a South African context.
The commentary within this website will also extend to game development and subject matters that encompasses the function that games
aim to serve within the demographic that interacts with them.
User Experience:
To create this balance and hopefully maintain it, this website will be divided into sections that detail and showcase my academic skill set
as well as expose users to thoughts around game studies and existing artefacts. These thoughts will also involve my social commentary and
thus a distinction in the form of “headers” will become very useful in guiding users exploring the website, knowing where to go from which point to reach the next point.
The point of all this is to induce an experience of what an extension of me would feel like within the constraint of a website. Users engaging with these various aspects
of the website will hopefully experience the well rounded balance i speak about and will probably have a tool from which they can examine and critique all information that was presented to them.
Interface Elements:
To foster an easy-to-understand directory and a consistent guidance throughout the website at large, the following are elements I aim to use:
Input Controls = The use of buttons and text fields. These will also be color coded intuitively to propel users to know that they should be clicking
a specific button at a specific point in time within the stage or level of the website they would be in.
Navigation Controls = The use of a search field right at the top of each webpage in the website that will aid the user in finding or looking up something
they may think about while on the website or to accelerate the exploring of the website faster.
Informational Controls= The use of tool tips could aid the users in navigating the website a bit more efficiently.
The application of Interaction Design within the concepts of URL schemes, directory structure, and semantic mark up:
As expressed in the lectures, the use of semantic mark up plays a huge role with regards to the type of content you want to show to your users
as well as how you want that content to be shown. Particularly as far as the content on the commentary aspect of my website is concerned,
it is very crucial that I make use of “section” and “article” tags as opposed to using “div” and “span” tags. The use of the latter tags
could affect or influence the way the content I want to portray is rendered.
Also, within the commentary realm of the content I aim to show the users, within the html code and for the purposes of bots potentially going through that code,
it is also very important to make use of clear and concise textual meaning and correlation tags. The commentary at large must have a well organized structure that enhances
the readability and by virtue of that induces information gathering and insights. This includes the use of “alt”, “figure”, “headings”, “ordered and unorder lists “tags,
to effectively get understandable information across in a well-organized html code.
In the part of the website where I will be redirecting users to an external site, the consistent use of the URL scheme chosen (https) is important not only for the ease accessing
of information within safe and secured spaces but also for the purposes of maintaining consistency with the web address(es) that the website at large will also be using.
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